Nostalgia Trap

Will Menaker is an editor at Liveright Publishing , who recently put out Jacob Bacharach's debut novel, The Bend of the World . I've known Will since graduate school, where we shared a common love for The Onion ,  The Sopranos,  and the weird ideological currents flowing through American popular culture. In this episode, we talk about his socialist ancestors, who opened cooperative factories in th...

Although the popular stereotype of "kids these days" has them staring apathetically at their phones, more concerned with selfies than politics, my experiences with young people at CUNY often give the lie to that idea. After a semester spent reading and writing about climate change, the students in Justin Rogers-Cooper 's English 101 course at LaGuardia Community College  were heavily engaged, and...

Claudia Moreno Parsons is a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College , and also the wife of your humble host. Since I've spoken to so many guests about the different people that made an impact on their lives, I thought that, for the podcast's 30th episode, it would be appropriate to speak with someone who's had a profound impact on my  life. Claudia talks with me about her childhood in...

Currently a professor in the Economics department at John Jay College  in New York City, Josh Mason is one of only a few economists that I know in real life, so it was great to have the opportunity to pick his brain about details we historians often tend to overlook. We talked about his background in left journalism, his work with major labor unions, the direction of U.S. labor politics, and the c...

I've known English professor Neil Meyer for many years, since our time spent concurrently at the CUNY Graduate Center, which spanned more or less the entire Bush and early Obama eras. I never knew Neil was from Detroit before this conversation, and the discovery allowed us an entryway into a wide range of historical and political phenomenon. We talked about his work in early American literature, h...

My conversation with Jayashree Kamble, a writer and English professor at LaGuardia Community College , was an opportunity to talk about popular culture, an intense and rich subject of study that, at least in my experience, is often met with some resistance in graduate history departments. Jayashree discusses her early education in India, how she decided to move to Minnesota for graduate school, an...

Sarah Jaffe is a freelance writer and journalist whose work appears in The Guardian , In These Times , Salon , and Dissent Magazine , where she co-hosts the Belabored Podcast . We had a fun conversation about 90s culture, the paradox of loving the NFL, Beyoncé's feminist status, Ferguson's continued uprising, the state of higher education and, of course, the biographical details of how "punk rock...

Steve Brier is a historian whose work at the American Social History Project  helped draw me into the field of working class social history. Steve also has some amazing stories about his father's time fighting fascists on the streets of East London in the lead-up to World War II, his time spent at Berkeley in the middle of the Free Speech Movement  in 1964, and his work and friendship with legenda...

Sarah Leonard is an exciting voice in left journalism, currently working as a writer and editor for The Nation , New Inquiry , and Dissent . She writes about stuff that matters: mass incarceration, feminism, the evolution of media and technology, and much more. We talked about her experiences working around figures from the Democratic Party, her take on Occupy's past and future, and the limits of...

Frances Fox Piven  is a towering figure of the American Left, a professor of political science whose combined academic work and political activism provide an extraordinary framework of ideas about poverty, race, war, and many other vital issues. We sat down for a conversation about her upbringing during the Great Depression, the development of her political values, her friendship with Howard Zinn...

James Oakes was sitting at the head of a frighteningly tiny conference table when I entered the room for my first graduate course at the CUNY Graduate Center  many years ago. A professor of American history, his intensely thoughtful approach to the discipline impressed and, of course, intimidated me. I've since come to know him as a serious and generous scholar, whose work on slavery and abolition...

In recent months I have been depending on writer and professor Anthony Galluzzo's fantastic Facebook feed for his uniquely cynical take on the latest news, notes, and opinions--particularly when it comes to higher education, gentrification, militarized police, imperial foreign policy, and lots of other big issues facing the world today. I finally got to sit down with him, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn...

I 've known Joe and John Lombardo since the mid-1990s, when I met them while working at a restaurant called Marie Callender's  in Ventura, California. As an alienated, nerdy teenager, I looked up to the Lombardo brothers as models of a different kind of man than the jocks and surfers I was surrounded by   in high school. In hindsight, they were my first encounter with hipsterism, and they taught m...

Nichole Shippen is a political theorist and professor at LaGuardia Community College  in Queens, New York. We talked a bit about her youth in a small rancher town in Wyoming, and how she navigated the particular cultural landscape of such a space. Our discussion focuses mainly on race, identity, and class structure in America, as we try to situate events in Ferguson, Missouri within a wider politi...

David Zeiger's documentary film Sir! No Sir!   had a profound impact on my graduate studies, educating me about the "GI movement" against the Vietnam War and kick-starting my project on the "GI coffeehouses" that functioned as the institutional support network for that important movement. We had a great conversation about his years growing up in Los Angeles, his need to "do something" about the wa...

During my early years as a graduate student in history, I took a course at the CUNY Graduate Center  called "From Civil Rights to Black Power," taught by Professor Clarence Taylor. The readings for the course, along with Professor Taylor's radical approach to American racial politics, completely rearranged my perceptions about race and American society, and helped set me on a path to becoming a ra...

Reading Todd Gitlin's book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage  was a major moment in my development as a historian. Gitlin's colorful, rigorous description of that turbulent decade heavily influenced my decision to study postwar American politics when I began my graduate studies in 2004. I recently sat down in his office at Columbia University to talk about his experience as president of Stu...

In 2004, when he was executive officer of the CUNY Graduate Center 's department of history, Professor Joshua Freeman  was my first contact and mentor in the early years of grad school. His expertise and generosity helped me and many others in our transition to a rigorous Ph. D. program. He is now a Distinguished Professor at the GC and teaches at CUNY's Queens College , sharing his deep knowledge...

Ammiel Alcalay  is a poet, writer, critic, translator, archivist, and much more. As a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center , he is known as much for his scholarship as for his generosity: with his time, with his attention to student's work, and with his talents as editor and writer. Ammiel recently visited my apartment for a conversation about his youth in Boston growing up around poet...

My friend Justin Rogers-Cooper , a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College  in Queens, New York, recently invited me to campus to record a "live" podcast with his students. The course was designed to help students consider, and prepare for possible participation in, the profession of teaching. Talking to bright young undergraduates about the "nuts and bolts" of pedagogy was a fascinati...

I've gotten to know Christopher Silsby  through our work together at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute  at Baruch College . Christopher's particular take  on the role of technology in education is one that continues to provoke engaging conversations at the Institute and beyond. It was a pleasure to sit down with him to hear about his upbringing in Kansas, his thoughts on education, a...

As the main adviser on my dissertation, Josh Brown  was and continues to be an important figure in the development of my own thoughts and ideas about American history. Active in the Vietnam antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Josh's vision of the historical discipline's social and political value is in part drawn from his experiences during that tumultuous era. We sat down to a great conversa...

I first met Barbara Garson while researching the GI coffeehouse movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which aimed to open antiwar, counterculture coffeehouses in small towns outside military bases, as part of a larger movement to end the war in Vietnam. Barbara's time spent working at such a coffeehouse in Tacoma, Washington was one part of a long career of writing and activism. Her controversial play...

Lavelle Porter is a writer with a fascinating set of interests, ranging from poetry and science fiction to racial politics, sexual identity, and the structures of higher education itself. His recent blog post, " More Thoughts on Graduate School ," resonated with anyone who's ever agonized over grad school-related decisions in their life, capturing some of the ambivalence that often accompanies the...

Why is the minimum wage so ridiculously low in 21st century America? My guests today (Eljeer Hawkins, Cora Bergantinos, and James Hoff) are part of the 15Now  movement, which is seeking to drastically shift the conversation about the minimum wage in cities across the U.S. In Seattle, the movement recently achieved a major victory , in part due to the leadership of Kshama Sawant , a city council me...